A Pleasure to Burn

A Pleasure to Burn

I am not an old man, nor am I a young man. As a middle man, I demonstrate and exemplify mediocrity in everything I do, it seems. Physically, my middle has grown larger as my legs and arms shrink. I remember half what I used to recall easily. Sometimes I want to do stuff while other times I just want to lay around. My performance as a contributing human in this world seems half-hearted recently. I sometimes suffer cracks in my personal education, things that just seem to have slipped through the middle right in front of me.

It was a pleasure to burn.

It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history.

That famous passage is the opening to the classic 1953 novel, Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury. Somehow, over the course of my life, I have managed to not pay any serious attention to anything Ray Bradbury has ever written, not even The Martian Chronicles or Fahrenheit 451. Such has been my loss.

Last week, I was looking around the house for something to read. I figured that there must be a book around that intrigued me enough to invest my regular evening television/Internet time. I stumbled onto this Bradbury book in my son’s recently abandoned room. Apparently, he was once forced to read it for one of his high school English classes. So I took it from his shelf and kept it hostage.

I fell for this book, and it has deeply affected me in ways that I can’t completely comprehend yet. As a book, it seems rather rough; almost pieced together. While I’m no expert on Bradbury’s writing style, I suspect he in fact did piece this tale together from shorter pieces. According to Bradbury in the Afterward, Coda, and Conversation attached to the 50^th anniversary edition of 451, he states that his writing style is different than many other popular writers of his time. He likes to enter into an idea and allow it to swallow him with no pre-conceived plan as to what will be recorded. He writes without a plan, a free exercise in emotion and expression. As I thought of this, I realized that I only satisfy my writing passion when I write with that style. Bradbury loves the short story and essay form, and so do I. He seems to struggle more with longer form writing, as do I. If you look over his career, you’d notice that he’s written in just about every form: poetry, short story, novel, novella, television, film, opera, and play. Despite over 500 works, he’s actually produced very few novels.

One interesting thing about his writing is that he remains fiercely proprietary over his work. When Michael Moore created the film, Fahrenheit 911, Bradbury was incensed and was quoted as saying "[Moore] is a horrible human being – horrible human!" Bradbury said that Moore never asked him to borrow from his famous title. Despite his hard edge regarding ownership of work, Bradbury has been very forthcoming over the years in expanding or even reformatting his most famous works.

In Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury studied our potential future society, one that has an eerie truthful ring 50 years later. In this future, citizens are numbed by “happy” wall entertainment. People are socially disengaged, preferring to hold up inside their technologically savvy homes. Politics runs on a “Pretty Boy Platform” where good looks mean everything. News is entertainment. Most shockingly, attainment of knowledge and reason are punishable offenses. Reading and studying books is a crime against the general welfare of that society. Free thinking and creativity are thought to be odd sicknesses.

The main character is Guy Montag, a fireman. However, firemen in this society have a much different responsibility than in our society. These firemen use fire to destroy knowledge. When the alarm goes off, they race to the scene, sniff out contraband with the help of an evil, emotionless mechanical hound, and torch the books as well as the house and sometimes the people inside. Fireman all know that paper burns when it reaches 451 degrees Fahrenheit. They live for the cool burn, the total destruction.

Guy, however, experiences an epiphany when he comes face to face with a vibrant, creative teen-aged girl. She lilts her way into his mind and heart, seduces his creative and inquisitive side. Suddenly, Guy’s predictably mundane life is turned upside-down. His inner turmoil builds as the action and burning picks up. When the book’s known world is destroyed in an atomic conflagration, Guy survives with a group of like-minded academics and they are last seen plotting a future where knowledge, creativity, and free thought are reseeded in the brave new world.

Bradbury wrote this book in difficult times. Society was scarred by memories of Hitler’s evil and was experiencing the iciness of Stalin’s repression. Those world pressures, coupled with the mass insensitivity of Senator Joe McCarthy and his cronies, bred Bradbury’s dark vision for the future society.

As I look out in the world today, I see much of what Bradbury warned us of 50 years ago. I suppose I don’t have to tell any of you how disengaged people have become. We spend our time zipping from place to place always pressured to be in place to join the nightly warped reality of “Survivor” and “American Idol.” People are “Lost” “24” hours a day.

With the attention of society focused on “happy” entertainment, our world is careening out of control. Our government has bypassed designed checks and balances while happy citizens dance an i-Pod induced jig. Based on fear and lies, our young men and women are sent abroad to fight insane, unwinnable wars. People who do stand in dissent are either thought to be treasonous, whacko, or simply ignored. Much like the society Bradbury painted 53 years ago, today’s society is poised on the deadly precipice of indifference, intolerance, and idolatry.

We are in the middle of some profound societal upheaval in our world beyond our ability to reason. Something will break soon, and for someone, some group, some country, some religion; it will be a pleasure to burn.